[In the following essay, written in 1888 and included in his 1919 collection, Symons asserts that Day's modest gift was for light, fanciful verse rather than drama in the mode of Shakespeare or Ben Jonson. Nonetheless, he finds Day's comedies lively and entertaining, if not always consistent or substantial.]

John Day, “sometime Student of Caius College, Cambridge,” a “base fellow” and a “rogue” according to Ben Jonson, a good man and a charming writer if the evidence of his own plays may be credited, seems to have come down to posterity in the person of his best work, and of little beside his best. When he began to write for the stage is not known,—before 1593, some have supposed—but we learn from Henslowe's Diary that in the six years from 1598 to 1603 he had a whole or part share in as many as twenty-two plays, only one of which, The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, has come down to us. These plays were: in 1598, The Conquest of Brute, with the first finding of the Bath (Day, assisted by Chettle); in 1599, The Tragedy of Merry and The Tragedy of Cox of Collumpton (with Haughton), The Orphan's Tragedy (with Haughton and Chettle); in 1600, unassisted, The Italian Tragedy of … [name wanting in the Diary] The Spanish Moor's Tragedy and The Seven Wise Masters (with Dekker and Haughton), The Golden Ass, and Cupid and Psyche (with Dekker and Chettle), The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green (with Chettle); in 1601, The Second Part of the Blind Beggar, and The Third Part (also with Chettle), The Conquest of the West Indies (with Haughton and Wentworth Smith), The Six Yeomen of the West, Friar Rush and the Proud Women of Antwerp, and The Second Part of Tom Dough (all three with Haughton); in 1602, unassisted, The Bristol Tragedy; Merry as may be, The Black Dog of Newgate, The Second Part of the Black Dog, The Unfortunate General (all with Hathway and Wentworth Smith), and The Boast of Billingsgate (with Hathway and others); in 1603 or earlier, Jane Shore (with Chettle). In 1610, we learn from the Stationers' Register, Day wrote a play called The Mad Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bankside; in 1619, with Dekker, The Life and Death of Guy of Warwick; again with Dekker, in or before 1623, a “French tragedy” of The Bellman of Paris; and in 1623, a comedy, Come see a Wonder. Of extant plays, The Isle of Gulls was published in 1606; The Travels of the Three English Brothers, Sir Thomas, Sir Anthony, Mr. Robert Shirley (written in conjunction with Rowley and Wilkins), in 1607; Law-Tricks, or Who would have thought it, and Humour out of Breath, in 1608; The Parliament of Bees, in 1641; and The Blind Beggar in 1659. There is also extant in the British Museum (Sloane MS. 3150) an allegorical prose tract entitled Peregrinatio Scholastica, first published in Mr. Bullen's collected edition of Day's works in 1881; a begging acrostic on the name of Thomas Dowton, an actor; an undated letter of Day from which we learn of a poem on The Miracles of Christ; a few autograph lines belonging to some lost historical play: “the rest is silence.”

It is not a pleasant thought that a writer of such dainty and select genius as the author of The Parliament of Bees should have had to labour so hard, on such unworthy material, for so unthankworthy a public as that which left him to borrow of Henslowe two shillings, or it may be five shillings—“in Redy money,” as the record quaintly states. That the main part at least of these lost plays was but journeyman's work, work sufficient to the day and the evil thereof, seems evident from the mere titles, a small proportion no doubt of the whole, that have come down to us. Even Mr. Bullen finds it impossible to regret the loss; and he would be content to spare the Three English Brothers and the Blind Beggar as well. The fact is, Day's range is exceptionally limited, and outside his circle he has no magic.

In turning over the pages of Lamb's Specimens, it is with something of relief, after so much that is bloody and gloomy, that we come on the two or three brief extracts from The Parliament of Bees, by which alone, for so long a space of time, the name of John Day was known to English readers. They are so light and bright, so delicate in the wording and phrasing, so aloof and apart from the commonness of everyday doings, or the sombre action of that little world of the Elizabethan drama. The choicest of Day's work comes with just such a sense of relief to the student who has traversed that country widely. It is a wayside rest, a noontide hour in the cool shadow of the woods. There is something so pleasant about the work, that we find ourselves pardoning its faults and overlooking its shortcomings, almost without thinking about them. Day—it is clear if we really consider the matter—has but a very slight insight into human nature, only a very faint power of touching or moving us, no power whatever to mould a coherent figure or paint a full-length portrait; as to plot, he is content with none at all, as in the Bees, or, as in the other three comedies, the plot is of such fantastic and intricate slightness, a very spider's-web of filmy threads, that it is not to be grasped without coming to pieces. His wit is a clear flame, but thin and only intermittent. Day's natural gift in that way is not so rich that it can stand a long draw on its exchequer. The good money becomes used up, and then, instead of putting up the shutters, the bank passes bad currency. All these are serious faults; they are leaks enough to sink a weightier reputation; but, somehow, they do no more than temper our delight in Day. The world of his fancy is not the world of our common sunlight; and life is lived otherwise, and men and women are somewhat other than the men and women of our knowledge, there. It is a land into which the laws of logic can scarcely come; a land where gentle and petulant figures come and go like figures in a masque, aimlessly enough, yet to measure, always with happy effect, threading the forest paths as we see ourselves in dreams, dreams sleeping or waking, ever on the heels of some pleasing or exciting adventure. The conversation, whenever it is good, is carried on in jests, or in flights of lyrical fancy, somewhat as in Shakespeare's early comedies, somewhat with a sort of foretaste of the comedies of Congreve. If it is not the talk of real life, it is at least a select rendering of our talk at its brightest and freest, when black care is away, and the brain is quickened and the tongue loosened by some happy chance, among responsive friends in tune with a blithe mood. It is how we should often like to talk; and that accord with our likings of things, as apart from our consciousness, not always pleasant, of them, is the secret of a certain harmony we seem to feel in those parts of Day's comedies which are least like life. He steps quite through the ugly surface of things, freeing us, as we take the step with him, of all the disabilities of our never quite satisfied existence.

This land of fancy to which Day leads us, is essentially quite as much a land of fancy in the comedies which profess to chronicle the doings of men and women, as in the comedy whose dramatis personæ are all bees. In The Isle of Gulls, Law-Tricks and Humour out of Breath, equally as to the spirit, very differently as regards the point of execution, Day has painted life as it pleased him to see it—in a delightful confusion, made up of entanglements, disguises, jests, sudden adventures, good-hearted merriment, a comedy within a comedy. Compared with Humour out of Breath, the two other plays have a certain coarseness of texture—comparative only, let it be understood; the action is not so pleasant, nor the wit so spontaneous. They are immensely lively, always entertaining, ravelled up with incomparable agility, full of business, wit and humour; breaking every now and then into seriousness, and, in the later play particularly, blossoming out quite unexpectedly into a tender and lyrical pathos; as in that scene where the forsaken countess talks with such sweet sadness to her maids as they sit at their sewing—a little passage of pure exquisiteness, reminding one, as now and again Day will remind us, of certain of the loveliest bits of Shakespeare. In another single scene in The Isle of Gulls, the tennis-court scene, we find a quite typical example of Day's special variety of wit, thin and captious indeed, but swift in its interchange of strokes as the tennis-balls, flying to and fro, with sharp and harmless knocks, in repartees deftly delivered and straight to their aim. It is in Humour out of Breath, however,—so suggestively named, and so truly, for the little play keeps us breathless at the heels of its breathless actors—here, rather than anywhere else outside The Parliament of Bees, that the special note of Day's cheerful genius is heard most clearly. It has his finest polish, the cream of his wit, the pick of his women. Day's women are singularly charming: they are all of one type, and that no very subtle one, but they are immensely likable, and in this play we have the very best of them,—Florimel, Emilia's sister, Hippolyta's and Violetta's, but the most beautiful and brilliant of her sisters. Emilia, in Law-Tricks, reminds us, by anticipation, of Millimant; as Miso, in The Isle of Gulls, with her “As I am a Lady,” seems almost like a faint foreshadowing of the most tragic figure on the English Comic stage, Lady Wishfort. But Florimel, calling up no associations of Congreve or any other, proves the most delightful of companions. She, like her sisters, is a creature of moods, bright, witty, full of high spirits, very free-spoken, but less free in action than in speech; a thoroughly English girl, perhaps the ideal of our favourite mettlesome breed. You can see her lips and eyes in a smile, flashing as her saucy words; and she is good-hearted, capable of strength in love. Here, as so often elsewhere, Day's instinctive sympathy with whatever is honest, lovely and of good report, shows itself in unthought-of touches. He cannot conceive a villain; his fantastic figures and the fantasy of his action have alike a basis of honesty and rectitude, never intrusive, scarcely visible perhaps, often, but there if we choose to look for it. Just this quality, going out into very homely material, gives to the hasty, irregular, rough and romping play of The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green a saving grace, and not of morals, but of art; for it is a touch of nature. Touches of nature there are, but of another kind, in Humour out of Breath; always, however sincere, however serious, with an after-thought or atmosphere of brightness in or about them: as in Aspero's wooing of Florimel, passing out of jests and quibbles into hearty earnest, earnest from the first perhaps on both sides, though the lady has a dancing wit, and the gentleman goads a sober tongue to curvets. How pretty a touch of nature is this: “I cannot live without him!” cries Florimel, when her saucy petulance has driven away her lover. “O that he knew it, lady,” suggests the quick-witted little page, at fault for once in a lover's moods; for, “He does,” returns Florimel, never at fault; “he would never have left me else. He does!” Touches of this sort, true to nature in the more intimate and subtle sense, are not common in Day; he is not wont to reveal anything new to us in our own hearts, or to go often below the surface. It would be unfair to lay this to his charge, for he does not profess to give us more than we find in him. “Humour out of breath,” a world where wit is the all in all—this is what he gives us; a world, how delightful to contemplate, where men and women are so careful to their jests, and the measure and harmony of this absorbing play-business, that they will even (as Polymeter says on some occasion, in another play) “leave at a jest,” and turn the conversation after a period of punning.

I have said that the scene of these three comedies is virtually a land of fancy; in The Parliament of Bees it is not only virtually but formally so. No instinct could have been happier than that which led Day—could it have been with any thought of Aristophanes?—to turn the “men and women fashioned by his fancy” into bees, and give them a whole play to themselves. That this was an afterthought, only come upon after a large part of what now forms the play was written, seems evident; for, as Mr. Bullen has pointed out, “with the exception of characters 1, 11, and 12, which were plainly written for the occasion, the masque seems to have been made up of scenes, more or less revised, contributed to [Dekker's] Wonder of a Kingdom, [Samuel Rowley's] Spanish Soldier, and other plays that have either been lost or where the connection remains yet to be pointed out.” There is not even an attempt at anything like a plot; what we have is a sequence of scenes, sketching, and lightly satirising, the “humours” of the age under this queer disguise of the bees. It is doubtful whether Day ever intended it, but in this fantastic masque of his there are all the elements of an heroically comic picture of life; life seen from the point of view of an outside observer, in all its eager stir and passion, so petty and so vain if one could look down on it from above—in all its strenuous littlenesses, its frail strength, its gigantic self-delusions; petty, all of it, to the Gods, as these tiny creatures, with their insect life of a summer, seem to men. Here is the quack, the braggart, the spendthrift, each with all the passions of a man—and just as long as your nail! But if this view enters at all into Day's scheme, it is suffered to add no bitterness, no touch of spleen, to this sweet and gracious little play, revised, as we know from an earlier manuscript still existing, with such a tender care, not only for the clear polish of the lines, but equally for the pleasant wholesomeness of the story, the honesty and fair fame of the little personages. Quite the best scene, the sixth, between Arethusa and Ulania concerning Meletus, has gained the most from this revision: it is free now from any speck, and is one of the loveliest pastorals in our language, a little masterpiece of dainty invention, honey-hearted and without a sting; touching at one point, in the last speech of the poor neglected bee, the last limits of Day's capacity for pensive and tender pathos. Nothing in the play is so bee-like, nothing so human, as this all-golden episode; though in pastoral loveliness it is touched, I think, by the wood-notes of the final octosyllabics—verses of exquisite inappropriateness for bees, but with all the smell and freshness of the country in them, a pageant of the delightful things of nature and husbandry, written in rhymes that gambol in pairs like lambs or kids in spring.

Without The Parliament of Bees we should never have known what Day was capable of. The wit and invention of his comedies of adventure make up, it is true, a very distant and a very important part of his claim on the attention of posterity; but these comedies, after all, are very largely written, especially in the best parts of them, in prose, and it is as a poetical craftsman that Day is most himself and most perfect. Such a line as this:

Who then shall reap the golden crop you sow?

bears the very sign and seal of Day. Or, again:

The windows of my hive, with blossoms dight,
Are porters to let in our comfort, light.

Our comfort, light—the very cadence of these beautiful words rings of Day, and the meaning equally with the sound. His peculiar vein of fancy comes out typically in those lines where the Plush Bee longs, like Alexander, for “ten worlds”—indeed to sell, but to sell “for Alpine hills of silver,” so prettily extravagant, so new and unthought-of a phrase. Familiar and quite ordinary ideas, commonplace thoughts, take in his mind an aspect which gives them all the charm of a pleasing novelty—a fanciful aspect, very fresh and pleasant, the good cheer of fancy. There is often an airy spring in his moods, lifting his honest commonplaces quite off the ground; transforming them, as frost transforms and transfigures the bare branches of the trees. The very sound of his rhymes is a delight in itself, as in those lines which tell how

                                        of the sudden, listening, you shall hear
A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring
Actæon to Diana in the spring.

Instinctive harmony—a sense of delicate music in the fall and arrangement of quite common words, entirely without factitious aid, as of undue alliteration, or the smallest sacrifice of matter to metre—this is his gift; and it is without any appearance of effort that verse flows after beautiful verse, so easy does it seem for him to “add to golden numbers golden numbers.” Easy or not, we know it was not without labour that this play of his became what it is. Day was no trifler, slight, airy, fantastically delicate as his work may be; it was not a trifler, a workman careless of the things of art,who wrote these lines:

                    The true Poet indeed doth scorn to gild
A coward's tomb with glories, or to build
A sumptuous pyramid of golden verse
Over the ruins of an ignoble hearse.
His lines like his inventions are born free,
And both live blameless to eternity:
He holds his reputation so dear
As neither flattering hope nor servile fear
Can bribe his pen to temporize with kings:
The blacker are their crimes, he louder sings.

The writer of these splendid lines was no “base fellow” such as Ben Jonson's hasty spleen would have dubbed him, but a poet with an instinctive sense of melody which Jonson never possessed, and an ideal of art as lofty as Jonson's own. His work has no conquering force, no massive energy, no super-abundance of life; these qualities we can get elsewhere, but nowhere save in Day that special charm of fancy and wit and bright invention, “golden murmurs from a golden hive,” for which, if there is any saving grace in these things, we can suppose his name will live a little longer yet.